


We weren't important, or: "I just have a lot of feelings about Scott McCall's mental health"

by amorremanet



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Ableism, Ableist Language, Alternate Character Interpretation, Angst, Character Study, Complicated Relationships, Control Issues, Daddy Issues, Depressed Scott, Derek Hale & Scott McCall Friendship, Derek Hale is Bad at Feelings, Eating Disorders, Emotional Hurt, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Emotions, Episode: s03e06 Motel California, Episode: s03e10 The Overlooked, Feels, Gen, Headcanon, Hurt No Comfort, Hurt Scott McCall, I Don't Even Know, I'm Sorry, Lydia Martin & Scott McCall Friendship, Mental Health Issues, Meta, Minor Allison Argent/Scott McCall, Past Child Abuse, Powerlessness, School, Scott Blames Himself, Scott Feels, Scott McCall & Stiles Stilinski Friendship, Self-Harm, Suicidal Scott, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide, Suicide Attempt, Triggers, i just have a lot of feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-11
Updated: 2013-08-11
Packaged: 2017-12-31 16:17:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1033748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amorremanet/pseuds/amorremanet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>So, there's some really important context on where I'm coming from here: Scott's dealing with a lot of shit, he's been dealing with a lot of shit for the better part of a year; his coping mechanisms are all, to some degree, ineffective or else completely non-existent and he's repeatedly shown that he puts the welfare and safety of others above his own self-care, even on a very basic level (like say for instance, giving himself over to Deucalion—who could potentially kill him if Scott doesn't toe his line—in order to save Melissa and Sheriff Stilinski); he feels responsible and guilty over things that, in some cases, it is literally impossible for him to be responsible for—and yeah, the Wolfsbane initially triggered his suicide attempt at the Glen Capri, but no, that wasn't just the Wolfsbane. A lot of it was also Scott himself hitting a very, very understandable breaking point.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	We weren't important, or: "I just have a lot of feelings about Scott McCall's mental health"

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so. This was originally drafted as a meta post for my tumblr… but then I broke tumblr or something, because it decided that it wasn't going to let me post 11,000 words of Thoughts And Stuff about Scott McCall and self-harm (and suicidal ideation, and abuse, and the US educational system—look, it's kind of all over the place, this is just what happens when my ADHD and I write things without an outline), so… I split it up into three posts on tumblr, and I'm also cross-posting to AO3 because it might be slightly more readable on AO3 and also because I'm really fond of this not-exactly-meta and I wanted to share.
> 
> If you'd rather read it all on tumblr, though, it's posted [over here](http://amorremanet.tumblr.com/post/58018519244/given-that-this-post-is-slightly-outrageous-in). And if you want to read it on LJ, [that post is over here](http://amor-remanet.livejournal.com/588591.html).
> 
>  **NB:** Please keep in mind, as per the posting date, this so-called "meta" was written and originally posted the day before Alpha Pact aired and a few days before Lunar Ellipse leaked on itunes, and I haven't revised this since originally posting it on LJ and tumblr (and I'm actually posting this at three in the morning on 6th November, 2013 so there's been enough time to revise and expand it if I'd wanted to do so). As such, neither of those episodes is included in this discussion (but if I wanted to, I could probably write a whole 'nother obnoxiously long meta/headcanon/feels post/word vomit about the last ten-ish minutes of Alpha Pact and how all three of the people who'd watched Scott try to kill himself at the Glen Capri… completely failed to say anything about letting him go through with a plan that involved letting Deaton drown him without any guarantee that Scott would make it back from that or that he'd want to make it back from that. But… I'm not saying that I'll never do the thing? I just don't feel like doing it right now, so).
> 
> …And really, if I did want to revise anything in this meta, I'd want to make Scott's race and ethnicity a more prominent part of things and take them into consideration more than I do in here (because they come up, but only briefly, which isn't really enough due time and consideration even though this "meta" is more about Scott's mental health than anything else, just given the pervasive impact that racism has on every aspect of POC's lives and experiences including their experiences of mental health issues, ableism related to mental health, ableism related to different learning styles and how they fit into the US educational system, and so on). Not paying enough attention to Scott's race and ethnicity was a careless oversight on my part and, although I still stand by all the thoughts and feels and interpretations and headcanons in this "meta," that oversight is a flaw in how things are expressed and nuanced.
> 
> I wouldn't revise my overly casual and conversational writing style, though. That part can stay.

Okay, so this is a post about Scott McCall and self-harm. It's really not going to amount to much more than, "blurble blurble, I just have a lot of feelings about Scott and I'm trying to sort through them all right now" so… I probably wouldn't expect a lot here. It's also not really a meta so much as me trying to parse through things in the interests of writing a fic, but there are kind of some meta elements to it, I guess, since it's grounded in character analysis-y type things, in its own way. but anyway… yeah. Scott McCall and self-harm. we're gonna talk about that now. or, well, I'm going to talk about it now and I welcome discussion, if anyone's particularly motivated to join in the conversation here.

I also feel like I should be clear about this, before we go any further: I don't think that Scott self-harms in canon, and I don't think that we're supposed to watch Teen Wolf canon and think, "oh that Scott McCall kid is a total self-harmer," and this is in no way an experiment in exegesis. It's more of an experiment in, "so, I had this idea and thought it might be an interesting fic, and I'm mostly trying to rationalize it and put everything together, based on the canon information we have about Scott and what he's going through." It's an exercise in fandom as a continuation and transformation of canon, and a lot of it is probably more grounded in projecting onto Scott than anything else, much in the same way that I project onto Dean Winchester a lot when I look at him and go, "oh honey, you so totally have an eating disorder, like really."

I do think that, with what we've been shown of Scott's emotional state and what he's going through in canon, it's not entirely unreasonable to go, "well, Scott could conceivably turn to self-harm as a coping mechanism"… but I'm not by any means saying that this hard-facts canon because it's empirically not. It's really just an, "I think that this COULD happen—I'm not betting on it in canon because of reasons, and if it were to happen in canon, I think Jeff Davis would probably screw it up because I set a very low bar for him in general, it's how I avoid disappointment and yet he still finds ways to let me down somehow—but it COULD happen, given X, Y, and Z canon stuffs" sort of thing.

I guess you could also call this a post of headcanons and interpretation, but in all due fairness, it's more a situation of going, "well, I have this idea and here are some facts from canon that support it" than a situation of going, "here are some facts from canon, I'm going to try to interpret them." Like, all of my old literature professors would be very, very disappointed in me for this post because dang it, they taught me to perform exegesis not eisegesis that's a very bad damn Kassie and I should really really know better than this, but I'm okay with that, blurble blurble Scott feelings.

…also, I feel like I should apologize in advance for the outrageous length of this post. like, I honestly have no idea what the fuck happened here, but when I sat down and started writing this post last night, I expected it to maybe top out at a thousand words, maybe 1,500 if I really got going about my feels or something—and now here we are, I've been writing it without any extended breaks since I woke up (the longest break I took was going out and picking up the takeout for dinner), and it's well over 8,000 words, and I feel like I haven't really said anything more than, "blurble blurble I just have a lot of feelings about Scott, someone please come and have feelings about Scott with me, I feel so lonely with all of my Scott feelings, who wants to come cry with me"

so, yeah. Long post is long, and probably doesn't add very much to the discussion at all, and I am sorry for these things.

So, point the first: …I originally had point the second as point the first, but I think that, before we go anywhere else, we really need to talk about Motel California and how I interpret Scott's suicide attempt. short version: yeah, the Wolfsbane started it, but no, that wasn't just Scott being intoxicated; all the Wolfsbane really did in Scott's case, aside from the obvious hallucinations and what happened with him and Allison, was bring out things he was already feeling and shove them to the foreground. this is basically what happened to Ethan, Boyd, and Isaac, too (with Ethan's anxiety about being subsumed by Aiden, Boyd's guilt over Alicia's disappearance and possible/implied death, and Isaac's memories of his father's abuse), but the big difference between the three of them and Scott, for me, is that while they wouldn't have done what they did under the influence of the Wolfsbane without it triggering them, Scott very well might've tried to kill himself at some point without the Wolfsbane.

like for example: Isaac's vocally not a fan of small spaces—y'know, understandably, after being locked in the chest freezer as a punishment—and he wouldn't willingly put himself into one without being influenced somehow, or forced into it, like with Harris forcing him to restock the janitor's closet with Allison, and then Ethan and Aiden locking them in. When he hid himself under the bed, he was putting himself into a seriously enclosed space—one that he was hallucinating as the freezer, as though it being an enclosed space wasn't bad enough on its own—and it wasn't really a conscious action on his part. He was reliving a moment when his father locked him in the freezer, and since he went in the freezer in the flashback, he put himself into a symbolic freezer in order to emulate the actual freezer (which all things considered, probably made everything worse for him, because it was probably really triggering).

But Scott… like, to say that Scott McCall is dealing with a lot of fucked up crap right now really doesn't go far enough, you know what I'm saying? Like, Scott McCall has empirically been dealing with a lot of fucked up crap since "Wolf Moon" and for the most part, he's had some kind of support network, but like… for one thing, they're not perfect (both for reasons of personality/actions—like how Derek is an abusive fuck-head, and how Stiles tries to be a good friend but can often get hung up on being selfish or insensitive—and other factors, like how Melissa didn't know all of what Scott was going through and like how Allison also had a lot of her own shit to deal with, like being lied to, abused, and manipulated by people she trusted and loved, and Victoria and Kate dying, and Matt stalking her, just to name a few things). and on the other hand, Scott places a high value on protecting them, often (or at least not infrequently) at his own expense.

like, I really think that the Scott/Stiles exchange about protecting people from "Formality" is really important to this whole discussion, because it's such a crucial insight into what Scott values most and how much he values the thing in question: when Stiles says, "you can't protect everyone," he's advocating like, the sort of selfishness that's just a bare minimum requirement to stay alive; he's trying to tell Scott not to blame himself for Melissa getting upset that her date with Peter didn't go well (since it was interrupted by Stiles crashing his Jeep into Melissa's car in an attempt to get Peter away from her), and he's trying to tell Scott that no really Scott has no responsibility to save Derek's life, and he's trying to tell Scott that it's okay to not take everything onto his own shoulders, to not be a hero even if it seems necessary.

Because Scott is just a sixteen/seventeen-year-old kid who's been dealing with an unwanted species change, learning how to control his new powers and himself, and taking on heroic burdens on top of that, apparently because he believes the old Spiderman aphorism about great power leading to great responsibility. And, like, I freely admit that I give Stiles tons of crap and the majority of the reason why I like him is that Scott likes him, he's Scott's best friend, and when push comes to shove, Stiles usually comes through as Scott's best friend, usually—and see, this is one of the moments that, to me, represents Stiles coming through as Scott's best friend. Because it's completely fucking reasonable to tell your best friend, "hey, man, I know shit sucks right now and you feel responsible for making it all suck less, but this isn't actually your responsibility, you need to take the time to take care of yourself first, don't bite off more than you can chew okay, YOU CAN'T PROTECT EVERYONE."

And Scott's response to this is to say, "I have to." Not, "yeah, you're right, let's go do homework or something instead of worrying about Peter killing people and trying to make me join his pack." Not, "I see your point, even though I disagree, maybe there's some kind of compromise we can find between our differing perspectives on this issue." Not, "well, I have to do something about this, but maybe you're right and I don't have to fix all of it." No, Scott McCall says that he has to protect everyone, regardless of the fact that he's going to be doing this to his own detriment (which is implied in the scene but pretty explicit in canon at that point, since Scott is already dealing with certain consequences arising from both the sudden, unwanted species change and from his fledgling attempts at heroism, like his slipping grades and the way that he temporarily loses Allison's trust for a while in there, not to mention the way that Jackson harasses him).

And let's just remember: this happens in SEASON ONE. Late season one, sure, but still, season one. And this is really the first proper vocalization of Scott's theory of his own heroism—which is that he feels like he has to protect everyone, even Derek who's abused him, and Jackson who's been a royal douche to him—but it's also built up to a LOT in season one.

Like, for instance, in the contrast between Derek's and Scott's motivations for wanting to stop Peter: before they know that Peter's the Alpha, Derek doesn't seem particularly concerned with all the people dying because of Peter, he's more interested, specifically, in finding out who killed Laura so he can avenge her, and he's trying to train Scott up as a werewolf because they are stronger together and he can use Scott to accomplish this; in "Code Breaker," Derek only goes after Peter with Scott when Scott brings him conclusive evidence that Peter was in control of himself when he murdered Laura and that the murder was premeditated. On the other hand, Scott actually cares that people are dying and he wants to stop Peter because it's the right thing to do, because Peter is running around and killing people and Scott can't let that happen (especially not to Allison and her family, because he loves her)—yes, Scott also believes that stopping Peter means getting a cure for his lycanthropy, thanks to Derek, but even before Derek puts that thought in Scott's head, Scott wants to save people.

So, Scott's been shouldering the heroic burden of saving people's lives since season one, and it's only gotten a lot worse since then. like, empirically, it has gotten a LOT worse. the body count on Teen Wolf has gotten positively ridiculous in a lot of ways, between Matt and kanima!Jackson's killing spree, the Alpha pack, and Jennifer/the Darach, and as he vocalized in Motel California, Scott feels, to some degree, responsible for all of these deaths, for all of the people who've been hurt in the crossfire. And that's not new or limited to people dying, either. In "Shape Shifted," he feels responsible for getting Isaac out of the holding cell because he knows that Isaac's innocent of his father's murder. When Derek starts turning emotionally vulnerable teenagers, Scott feels responsible for protecting Isaac, Erica, and Boyd because he knows things are going to blow up. Scott carries so much stress because of the responsibilities he takes on as hero, it's kind of unbelievable that he's still having any semblance of a "normal" life.

And, like, it's not as though Scott's life was completely free from responsibilities and sources of stress before he got turned here: he was balancing work, school, friends, and lacrosse; he and Melissa are implied to have some issues with money and stretching paychecks (unlike rich douche Jackson and Stiles, who thinks nothing of telling Scott to just buy a new phone); Scott's also managing a chronic illness as best as he can, which depending on how severe his asthma was could be really time and energy-consuming (never mind the additional stress of managing his asthma in light of the specific way in which his father abused him, y'know with the whole… withholding Scott's inhaler during his attacks and telling him that the whole thing was just in his head business, which would probably not really encourage Scott to take care of his asthma that well because what if Shitty Dad's right and he's just making it up—and like, there's Melissa to factor in here, because she's a nurse and she would go, "no, Scott, don't listen to your father" and Scott would listen to her because he trusts his mother, but…

it's complicated, is my point here, and teenagers usually have trouble managing chronic illnesses—Hell, adults have trouble managing chronic illnesses, are we really expecting it to be any easier for teenagers—which I say as someone who used to be a teenager who had to manage chronic illnesses. Not asthma specifically, but still).

And I feel like, given canon evidence and fandom discussions of it, Scott and his relationship with school and academics needs some special note over here: school is a big issue and source of debate among Teen Wolf fans, and it's a really contentious topic with people for a lot of reasons (like some people are upset about people writing Scott off as "stupid" because of his grades during season one and season two, but other people critique the way that folks express their frustrations with people writing Scott off as "stupid" because they're still overly focused on academic achievement as a measure of intelligence, as a measure of personal worth, and perpetuating certain ableist, toxic ideas about the nature of intelligence)… and I get almost every side of this argument in some way. Except for the people who call Scott "stupid," I don't get those people at all and they can go suck on a railroad spike, they're tacky and I hate them.

With that being said: my personal read of Scott's situation with school stuff is that Scott is really damn smart (I mean, shit how many times in season one does Peter go, "wow, Scott, that was so clever of you, I'm legit impressed, oh you precious bb, I totally made the right call in biting you," and as several people have pointed out, Scott's failing test from "Magic Bullet" has, "not like you" written on it, AND he is in the same math class as Lydia, AND he out-gambited Gerard Fucking Argent, for fuck's sakes)—but for me, conventional book smarts are something that Scott has to work at. Like, Scott can improvise. Scott can think on his feet and connect the dots in ways that other people might not necessarily think of—which usually seems to mean, "in ways that don't get people killed because apparently almost everyone in Beacon Hills defaults to murder as a potential problem-solving technique." Scott is really, really damn smart—

It's just that the way in which he's smart isn't necessarily naturally suited to the conventional high school environment, which is a lot of memorizing and rote learning and not always exactly kind to someone who's more suited to outside-the-box thinking like Scott is. like, a huge part of Scott's character is defined by him thinking outside the box and fucking up everyone's neatly ordered crap by going, "your arbitrary rules are foolish and I reject them"—his whole True Alpha arc makes that even more explicit than it already was, because he's rejecting the accepted rules of How Alphaness And The Lines Of Alpha Succession Work And How To Be An Alpha, and he's writing his own rules, where being an Alpha is something defined by goodness and making the right choices, instead of murder and death and lust for power. And that kind of attitude doesn't really flourish well in most US high schools because most US high schools don't actually care about teaching kids anything except for: a. the agreed-upon mythology of the white, Western cishet patriarchy; and b. how to fall in line and kowtow to authority.

Which isn't to say that there aren't some good things that come out of the US educational system or US high schools—it's just to say that there is a certain type of person who and a certain type of intelligence that flourishes more readily in US high schools, and Scott doesn't fit those molds. He has to put in extra work in order to do well in school because his schoolwork requires him to think and learn in ways that don't come naturally to him, and unlike say, Stiles or Lydia, Scott has a harder time switching between the way he thinks naturally and the way school wants him to think. And that work was probably stressful enough on its own before he got dragged into the supernatural goings on in Beacon Hills and had to worry about whether or not he'd accidentally kill someone, or the way that so many people were suddenly dying, or whether or not someone was going to kill him or someone he loved. Trying to handle school well enough to get the grades that fandom seems to expect from him on top of everything else? Was probably asking way too much from Scott.

So, yeah… Scott is smart, but school is a stressor for him, too. Now, we've basically covered all of Scott's major sources of stress here, so what about coping mechanisms? Well, funny thing about those is… Scott doesn't have a lot of them and the ones he does have don't always work. Like, he has lacrosse—which Derek and Stiles try to take away from him before he learns how to control his werewolf powers, and which then becomes something of a stressor because Scott has to shoulder co-captain responsibilities. He has goofing around with Stiles—but Scott doesn't really let himself do that so much once he starts taking on heroic stuff and saving people. He has making out with Allison—but first they have their rough patch in season one (made worse by Scott knowing that the Argents are hunters and trying not to get killed), then they have the stress of sneaking around behind Allison's parents' backs, then they have being on opposing sides because of how very thoroughly Gerard manipulated Allison, then they're broken up and don't talk to each other for four months, and… like, yeah, this is, "making out with Allison" thing is not foolproof at all.

So finally bringing this back around to Motel California: Scott has a shit-ton of stress—not to mention a whole heaping pile of guilt because of all the people who die or get hurt in the crosshairs of this situation, because he feels like he couldn't save them, not to mention the recent reveal that the Alpha pack is in Beacon Hills at least partly because Duke wants True Alpha Scott on his team—and his list of coping mechanisms is really short and kind of ineffective. And none of this on its own means that Scott would just inherently be depressed or dealing with suicidal ideation, but the thing is, everyone has a breaking point. Everyone has limits and a point where they really can't take anymore. So, yeah, y'know maybe the Wolfsbane and Derek's apparent death brought Scott's stressed out, guilty feelings to the foreground and made them consume him—and gave him a hallucination of Deucalion killing Melissa just to get at Scott to boot—but I'd argue that those feelings were already there and that, even without the Wolfsbane triggering him, they were probably going to hit a boiling point on their own (or well, they would have if Davis respected Scott's emotional arcs as much as he respects Stiles's emotional arcs).

For one thing, this would fit with canon: like I said about Ethan, Boyd, and Isaac, the Wolfsbane didn't give them new feelings as much as it took things they were already insecure and upset about and went, "here, let me repeatedly stab you in the deeply rooted emotional and psychological issues" so it would make sense that Scott's suicidal ideation was already there. On top of that, consider what was going on in the immediately preceding episode: Scott literally wouldn't let himself heal because he felt responsible for Derek's apparent death—true, this wasn't conscious (not like the way he held off healing in "Fury" until Melissa couldn't see him doing it was implied to be), but it's still an indication that the feelings that led to Scott's suicidal ideation and suicide attempt didn't just pop up out of the snow like daisies. They're already there and Scott's coping with them, somehow, for better or for worse.

For another thing, though, it's my personal headcanon that Scott may not have been entirely himself when he initially lit up the road-flare, but that he was definitely himself by the time that Stiles, Allison, and Lydia found him. Canon really isn't clear about this point, and I think it's unclear to its detriment, but like… yes, Ethan was shocked out of his suicide attempt by touching the heater—but then, in Boyd's and Isaac's cases, it didn't look like Stiles touched them with the road-flare so much as he just waved it in their faces. Point being, it's not impossible that lighting up his own road-flare shook Scott out of the Wolfsbane haze and that he really was himself when he said, "But what if this is just me? What if doing this is the best thing that I could do for everyone else?" And that's the reading of canon that I choose to go with… because I'm kind of awful and it's more complicated than, "the wolfsbane made him do it," and blurble blurble, Scott feelings basically.

So, there's some really important context on where I'm coming from here: Scott's dealing with a lot of shit, he's been dealing with a lot of shit for the better part of a year; his coping mechanisms are all, to some degree, ineffective or else completely non-existent and he's repeatedly shown that he puts the welfare and safety of others above his own self-care, even on a very basic level (like say for instance, giving himself over to Deucalion—who could potentially kill him if Scott doesn't toe his line—in order to save Melissa and Sheriff Stilinski); he feels responsible and guilty over things that, in some cases, it is literally impossible for him to be responsible for—and yeah, the Wolfsbane initially triggered his suicide attempt at the Glen Capri, but no, that wasn't just the Wolfsbane. A lot of it was also Scott himself hitting a very, very understandable breaking point. And moving on now.

Point the second: Scott's emotional beats and emotional development have been really sidelined this season, and on a meta-textual level, the reason for this is, "because Jeff Davis is a douchebag and Stiles is his self-insert character and for some reason, Jeff seems to kind of dislike Tyler Posey (HOW CAN YOU DISLIKE TYLER POSEY) and favor Dylan O'Brien and all of these factors lead to Stiles carrying the emotional beats—even when they do nothing to advance the plot and drag down otherwise great episodes—while Scott handles more of the plotty and mythology-heavy things."

That's not really what I want to talk about in this post, though—what I want to do is to try to suss out an in-character, textual-level reason for why there hasn't been any serious discussion of Scott's feelings about literally anything that has happened to him (barring his speech in That Scene in Motel California, which is just, I mean, how can you watch That Scene and tell me that Posey doesn't have the chops to handle more emotional material than he's usually given) and Scott's emotional reactions to the stuff he's going through. So the assumption going on here is that yes, there is a meta-textual reason for why Scott doesn't get to talk about his feelings like Stiles does, but that there are also possible in-text reasons for this, which don't absolve Jeff Davis of the meta-textual reason but can still help us to flesh out Scott as a character (which we shouldn't need to do because Teen Wolf is his story, but that's another rant).

Having been in a vaguely similar place as Scott before—at least, in terms of dealing with suicidal ideation and attempting suicide and dealing with the longterm ramifications of emotional abuse, not in terms of, y'know, being a teenage werewolf superhero or anything—and based on a mix of personal experience and reading about other people's experiences, the first place that I go with that issue is… well, maybe on an in-character level, Scott isn't shown dealing with the emotional fall-out of everything that's happening and everything that he's going through because he's not really dealing with it. Well, okay, that's kind of a shitty way of phrasing things, because whether or not Scott is consciously sitting down and feeling his feelings and working through his issues, he's still going to be dealing with them somehow.

But, see, in keeping with all that stuff I said above about Scott putting other people's welfare before his own? …yeah, uh. That's going to make it really hard for him to actually open up to people about his problems. Like, one thing I love about Scott's heroism is that it's not defined in the typical (white) Butch Alpha Male model of, "I must isolate myself from all the people I love in order to save them"—Scott trusts people, Scott opens up to people, Scott relies on people… but one thing we never really see him opening up to people about, outside of his suicide attempt in Motel California and the occasional line about how he has to keep everyone safe, is this responsibility he feels with regard to protecting everyone and saving everyone. Like, he'll talk to Stiles about plans, and he'll talk to Allison about stuff, and he'll talk to Lydia about things—but it's still usually contextualized in the sense of Scott protecting them or needing help with protecting them, not in the sense of Scott going, "hey, guys, I really need some help myself with stuff that's only about me."

Like, there are a lot of reasons why Scott wouldn't want to open up to people about actively feeling suicidal. For one thing, it's one matter to say, "actually, I always have no idea what I'm doing" when the subject at hand is his heroism thing and he's couching it in a way that's like, "I don't know what I'm doing, but somehow, sometimes, it works out, but I still don't get why you're holding me up as someone to emulate here, Isaac"—but it's completely different to admit that he has no idea what to do about something that Scott would know would worry a lot of people. See, there's this conception that people who are dealing with suicidal ideation as only thinking about themselves and that they can't see how much people love them—but that's not universally true, and I definitely don't think it would be true in Scott's case. Scott knows that he has a support network; Scott knows that he is loved, even being the child of an abusive father, he knows this.

But the thing is, that's a double-edged sword in Scott's case because of the way that he puts other people's needs before his own. On the one hand, yeah, remembering that people love him could totally help pull him back from the ledge, like Stiles's, "Scott, you're my brother" speech did in Motel California (which, for the record, I think it's undeniable that Stiles talked Scott out of killing himself—like, Scott is a werewolf. Stiles is a human. Scott was probably stronger than Stiles before he got the Bite, to say nothing of how much stronger he'd be after becoming a werewolf. Stiles didn't have any apparent difficulty getting the road-flare out of Scott's hand, but if Scott had still wanted to kill himself in that moment, he could've easily held onto the road-flare instead of letting Stiles take it).

But on the other hand, I feel like Scott would probably get really guilty and self-blaming in the wake of this because how could he even think of killing himself when it would hurt so many of the people he loves and who love him back—not to mention all the societal bullshit about suicide that Scott's probably heard before, like, "suicide is weak, suicide is selfish, suicide is taking the easy way out, suicidal people are just attention-seekers, and so on, and so forth." He feels like he's supposed to be protecting them, not hurting them, after all, and for all he could also see killing himself as the best thing for everyone in the long run, he'd also be aware of the fact that it would hurt the people who love him, and he'd feel guilty for even considering it. (and oh god, putting this in the context of Shitty Dad McCall's abuse is so much worse, because he used to say that Scott's asthma was all in his head, and Scott trying to tell himself that his problems are all in his head and they really aren't that bad as a method of shaming himself, and oh god, I hurt.)

(I also think that, on some level, Scott probably isn't talking about what he's feeling and what he's going through because like… he may have convinced himself that it's easier not to talk about these things, that he can handle everything on his own well enough to function and save everyone and that he'll come back and clean up his own feelings later. Like, for example, it's probably easier in the short-term to convince himself that his suicide attempt at the Glen Capri was just the fault of the Wolfsbane and that maybe he's feeling all these things, but then he never would've done anything without the Wolfsbane triggering him into it—because thinking this makes the whole situation feel more tenable to Scott and feel more manageable. Thinking that he's mostly fine and that there was nothing underlying his suicide attempt beyond a case of wolfsbane poisoning allows him to keep going and handle the more immediately pressing issues like Alpha packs and trying to save Melissa and the Sheriff and so on and so forth.

The problem with this, in the long-term, is that thinking this denies the emotional complexity of the situation, and denies the fact that Scott's feelings aren't just the wolfsbane's fault, and is fundamentally grounded in Scott invalidating his own feelings, and it's like Dumbledore says to Harry, "numbing the pain for a while will just make it worse when you actually feel it" and all that—but at the same time? sometimes, you really can't deal with the pain right now because of a lot of reasons. sometimes, you just don't have the time or the resources to deal with the pain right now, so while putting off dealing with it makes things worse in the long run—especially in a case like Scott's where one of his major reasons to keep going is also one of the things hurting him and making him feel suicidal in the first place—temporarily putting the chronic issues aside really the only option because otherwise, you'd end up with a situation where you might be incapable of handling more immediate problems at all and they might end up completely consuming or destroying you.

it's like an issue of triage in a hospital, but it's emotional triage: the immediate problems need to get cleaned up first before they're allowed to take root and fester and turn into chronic issues of their own—like for instance, not saving Melissa and Sheriff Stilinski would make Stiles an orphan and send Scott back into the custody of his shitty abusive dad, all of which would just create new chronic issues while also making Scott's preexisting chronic issues that much worse, so in this case, it's really not an option for Scott to address the bigger underlying issue of his suicidal ideation—at least, it's not an issue that would work out well for Scott or anyone else, so Scott would probably reject it. and pretty understandably so, if you ask me, given not just Scott's heroism but also a practical outlook on the situation in general.)

Which is all to say nothing of how guilty he probably feels for Stiles's and Lydia's involvement in making sure he didn't die at the Glen Capri. Like, for one thing, Stiles is Scott's best friend, he's basically Scott's brother, there isn't a lot that Scott and Stiles wouldn't do for each other—and Stiles was willing to risk burning up with Scott in order to save his life. Then, they both almost went up in flames because of the road-flare rolling back toward the gasoline puddle, and even though she could've easily died in the process, Lydia tackled them out of harm's way. Like… dude, Scott is clearly not actually responsible for Lydia's and Stiles's actions, but it's easy to see the thought process he could come up with in order to blame himself for it: Lydia and Stiles made their own choices, but they only made those choices in reaction to what Scott did; Scott's actions created the situation that Stiles and Lydia found themselves in; therefore, Scott would have been responsible for Stiles and Lydia dying, if they'd died trying to save him.

So, like… feeling the responsibility to save people gives Scott a reason not to kill himself, sure, but it's also hurting him at the same time, because it's exacerbating his issues with shouldering too much crap, and not taking enough time for himself, and feeling guilty when bad things happen. And it creates an intense, unhealthy negative feedback loop where he feels like there is no hope—like, that's exactly what he vocalizes in Motel California, "there is no hope"—and like he's completely powerless (well, not entirely powerless, since having powers is what makes him responsible for people and their welfare in the first place, but bad things keep happening and Scott can't stop all of them), and like everything he tries to do just leads everyone from bad to worse. And like we discussed before, he doesn't really have any mechanisms for coping with all of this—he has temporary successes against the Alphas and the Darach to see him through, and he has a collection of little happy moments, but he doesn't have actual facts coping mechanisms. Which is what brings us around to…

Point the third: Scott and self-harm (…which is supposed to be the topic of this post in the first place, but I swear all of that prattling above is completely necessary context for this discussion). So, let's just establish something right off the bat so everyone's on the same page: there are a lot of reasons why someone might self-harm; there are a lot of different motivations for self-harming behavior and actions; although there are certainly trends and common motivations, every individual case of self-harm is unique (and this can even be true in the case of individual self-harming actions taken by the same person in different circumstances); people who self-harm are not necessarily suicidal, though they can be—and this is all especially important to keep in mind vis a vis Scott because, like I've already discussed, the things Scott is going through and feeling have so many layers that you really just can't reduce his hypothetical motivations for self-harming to, "well maybe it just makes him feel better because there's a rush of endorphins" or, "he's just doing it to feel alive," similar.

(It should really go without saying that you should never do this to anybody who self-harms, ever, and that if you do, you should just know that you're an insensitive asshole and you're probably not helping this person at all, no matter how much you think you might be. And if you're not saying it because you think you're being helpful, then you're probably like, saying it because you actively want to be an asshole, and if that's the case, then you really suck and should reevaluate your life and your choices immediately. Like, seriously, I'm not comically exaggerating here—don't fucking do this to someone who is self-harming for any reason at all. There is no "just" about self-harming, so please don't minimize someone's experiences like that. This has been a disclaimer about being a decent person.)

So, like I said, despite the fact that every case of self-harm is unique, there are trends and common motivations for self-harming, and for me, some of these motivations resonate with Scott while others don't. Like for instance, I don't really see Scott as the type to self-harm out of some motivation to punish himself—unlike say, Jackson (who put himself through Hell to try to make himself the best and would, I think, definitely punish himself for not being The Best) or say, Isaac (who in Motel California, put himself in a metaphorical freezer, which is an action inherently associated with being punished), Scott has issues with guilt and blaming himself for things that happen, but I think that he also realizes on some level that it's literally impossible for him to be responsible for something the things that he wants to make himself responsible for. He can rationalize blaming himself for them, sure, but making the next step to self-punishing self-harm is something that I can't really see Scott doing, not without something huge triggering him into it.

But that's just my headcanon about Scott, and I'm sure that someone else could probably make self-punishing!Scott work and be perfectly in character for Scott, so in the interests of keeping things, y'know, constructive (as constructive as anything in this post is going to get), I'm going to refocus my attentions onto the common motivations for self-harm that really resonate for me with respect to Scott, his feelings and what he's going through, etc etc etc and why I think these motivations would make sense for him, given what we see of Scott in canon and everything I've written above about Scott's emotional state right now (or at least, how I perceive Scott's emotional state right now, since all of my pondering is somehow based on canon nuances and aspects of Tyler Posey's performance, but most of it technically isn't canon since, like I mentioned, Scott doesn't get to have heartfelt monologues about his feelings).

The biggest one, the one that resonates the most with me in a Scott sort of way, is self-harming as a way of releasing tension and regaining control of one's life, and like, I think this resonates with me so much because it's pretty undeniable that control is something Scott's been struggling with since season one (and it's implied to be something he's struggled with since before season one). Like, on the one hand, there's the whole werewolf thing in the first place: Scott has no agency in becoming a werewolf, none at all, it's thrust onto him because Peter is trying to build up a pack in order to secure his own power—so there's control being wrenched away from Scott (think back to how he reacts when Derek tells him that the Bite is a gift—he says, "I don't want it" and while Scott eventually accepts his lycanthropy and uses his powers for good, he still wanted to find a cure for it at first and it's still something that he didn't choose for himself, so he's more than allowed to have mixed or even negative feelings about being a werewolf).

Control is then even further wrenched away from Scott because of getting turned: once a month, he has to fight to keep in control of himself and stop himself from maiming and killing people—and it's even worse when looking at more general and less full moon-related things. suddenly, he has all these shiny new superpowers, but sometimes they go haywire because they're new and he has no idea what to do with them, or how to control them, or anything. So there's the chance that he'll wolf out on the lacrosse field (which is what leads to Derek and Stiles trying to take that coping mechanism away from him), and in the middle of an exam, he can't control his super-senses, so he can hear absolutely everything going on in the classroom (and probably smell things he shouldn't be able to smell, and other sensory overstimulation things, but the main focus of the scene I'm talking about is Scott's auditory issues)—

and uh, I don't particularly headcanon Scott as autistic (I have other neurodivergent Scott headcanons), but like, as someone who is autistic and has dealt with sensory overload and overstimulation that wasn't entirely unlike what happened to Scott in that scene? …yeah, it's completely understandable to me that he freaked out like he did.

that sensory overstimulation shit is fucking scary and completely overwhelming even without hallucinating that your chemistry test is saying you might kill one of your friends on the full moon. and Scott literally has no ability to stop it from happening to him because, as a neophyte werewolf, he has little to no control over his powers, whether they're more active ones like wolfing out or more passive ones like his super-senses. which is also pretty fucking terrifying… like, he's a teenager and everything's tumultuous enough to begin with, he has all the real-life stresses I talked about above, and here he is, maybe he's not the most popular guy in school, maybe he's not on first line, maybe his life could be better in a lot of ways—but he also knows how to handle and manage things well enough… until Peter forcibly changes his species and Scott has to learn all new ways of handling everything, and all new ways of controlling himself, and so on and so forth.

and that's not even factoring Derek Fucking Hale and the job he does as Scott's self-appointed werewolf mentor into this discussion. Derek and the way in which he "mentors" Scott throughout season one really make the whole situation exponentially worse—like, credit where it's due and all, Derek's major motivation in s1 is decidedly figuring out who killed Laura and avenging her death, but I do genuinely believe that he cared, on some level, about making sure that Scott didn't kill anybody because he couldn't control his powers. I also believe that he didn't know about Scott's abusive father—and even if he had some idea that Scott's father was abusive, I don't think Derek really knew that much about Scott's situation and what his father did to him, not like for instance the way that Derek knew what Isaac's father did to him and still behaved abusively toward Isaac (from breaking his arm because he got snarky to throwing the glass at him in a deliberate channeling of Isaac's father).

but the fact that Derek's heart was (kind of) in the right place and the fact that he grew to really care about Scott (I triple dog dare you to look at how Derek reacts to Scott's howl in "Raving" and the way he says, "thank you" while Deaton's patching Scott up and then tell me that Derek doesn't care about Scott—he doesn't always care in the right way or do the right thing with the way he cares about Scott, but he does care about Scott) and the fact that he didn't know about how Scott's father used to withhold his inhaler when Scott was having asthma attacks and tell him that the asthma was all in his head… like, these facts to not absolve Derek of everything he does to Scott during season one. One of the tropes listed for him on the Teen Wolf characters page on TV Tropes is Drill Sergeant Nasty, and personally, I think that doesn't even begin to go far enough in describing the absolute Hell that Derek puts Scott through in the name of training him and what that "training" would do to Scott's sense of having control over his own life.

Like, Derek basically starts stalking Scott. He shows up in Scott's bedroom in the name of menacing him at least once. He chases Scott around parking structures, making him fear for his life, and then breaks his phone for no reason that I can clearly remember, beyond the phone going off while they were playing super-terrifying hide and go seek. He outright tells Scott that Scott isn't allowed to date Allison pretty much just because Derek says Scott isn't allowed to date Allison—and when Scott and Stiles look at this abusive behavior and conclude that Derek might be a murderer, instead of like maybe looking at why the two teenagers he's menacing and assaulting don't like him, Derek yells at them for it. More than once. He invalidates Scott's feelings while Scott is trying to save his life (and he does this right after Scott's helped knock out the guy who was torturing Derek at the moment, way to be grateful, Derek). This pattern escalates in the first episodes of season two, wherein Derek forces Scott to watch Gerard kill the unnamed Omega in an attempt to terrify him into joining Derek's pack, and tries to shame and menace Scott out of dating Allison and into joining the pack.

and like, I'm honestly not trying to bash Derek here… but he comes into a situation where Scott is already being deprived of agency and control, and then adds to the pattern of taking away Scott's agency and control. He waltzes in and just expects Scott to trust him, even though Scott literally has no reason to do so beyond, "well Derek is also a werewolf and he says that he can show me how to werewolf good"—and when Scott understandably goes, "uh, how about no," Derek starts breaking out the domineering asshole act and actively trying to control Scott's life and choices. and even though he cares about Scott, Derek still apparently hasn't learned anything about respecting Scott's agency because what did he do when he knew there was an Alpha pack moving into Beacon Hills and that they'd be a threat to Scott and the people he loves? …well, he just conveniently neglected to tell Scott about that. for four months. because rather than let Scott make his own choices about how to handle this, Derek wanted to ~*protect*~ Scott and let him have some teenage normalcy for once, which is like yes, your heart's in the right place, Derek but minus several million points for execution.

(and like, in the context of Scott and suicidal ideation, I can actually appreciate Derek giving Scott four months where all he had to worry about was work and summer school and saving up to buy his bike, because Scott doesn't give himself enough of a break and Scott doesn't take enough time out to take care of himself, and frankly, if after everything that happened in seasons one and two, just running into trying to hunt down the Alpha pack and find Erica and Boyd and save all the people and whatnot… that wouldn't have been very good for Scott. like, at all. so, in light of what Motel California reveals about Scott's emotional and psychological state right now, and also in light of the fact that Scott had to learn how to control himself without constant access to Allison, who let's remember had been his anchor until that point? I'm actually really happy that Derek gave Scott four months to breathe and be a teenager and deal with shit other than, "oh no everyone is going to die unless I stop it happening"—but Derek still didn't respect Scott's agency here, which was bad.)

never even mind that, you know, considering his abusive father who regularly invalidated the reality of his very real physical illness and refused to give Scott his inhaler… like, getting control and agency back in your own life is usually hugely important to people who've been in abusive situations, because one of the ways that abuse works is by denying the victim their control and agency, by making them follow what their abuser dictates because they're afraid of what might happen if they don't. the abuse ends up permeating every aspect of their lives and their decision-making, and even removing the abuser from the situation doesn't really magically fix everything—like, even getting rid of Shitty Dad McCall would leave Scott and Melissa with a lot of lingering, longterm aftereffects of him abusing them, and it takes a lot of time and effort to really regain control and agency after leaving an abusive situation, and some people never fully heal.

…so, yeah, control is an Issue for Scott—an issue that season three has only exacerbated. like, I read a meta a couple days ago about how all the conflict in season three so far is externally imposed more than arising from internal sources and the ways that this weakens the narrative, which was interesting as a meta-textual analysis, but taking this into the textual, in-character level, it's like… Scott has no control over the things that are happening to him and around him—it's Deucalion and Jennifer who are really calling the shots, and Scott ends up stuck in the middle as a desired object (a True Alpha!!) and the poor guy just trying to keep everyone alive. He's stuck in a perpetually reactive role rather than an active one, because for most of the season thus far, he has no idea what's really going on, much less how to make it stop happening, and on top of that, he feels responsible for all of the bad things that have been happening to people.

so basically, what all of this talking about Scott and control is building up to is this: Scott is in a state of pretty constant emotional distress, at this point (like seriously, how many times have we seen Scott smile this season? hint, it's not a lot); bad things keep happening to him and to the people he's trying to protect, and he doesn't have a lot of a say in what's going on or a lot of power to actually stop any of it, and the control and agency that he's fought so hard to get back after his father exited the picture are being ripped away from him yet again and there's really not a lot he can do about it. like, he's stuck in a situation where his choices are basically, "bad things happen" and, "slightly less awful things happen"—or in more practical terms, "Scott gives himself over to the guy who is creepily fixated on him and could very easily kill Scott if he doesn't toe Deucalion's line, and he maybe saves Melissa and the Sheriff from Jennifer in the process" and, "Scott gets to keep his freedom and his agency, but Melissa and the Sheriff are so much more likely to die."

on top of all that, he isn't really in a state where he can control his own mind and his own thoughts right now—remember all that talk above about Scott and suicidal ideation? yeah, well, about that… when push comes to shove, I don't think that Scott really wants to die, as such. he's dealing with suicidal ideation, yes, and he's dealing with thoughts that go, "what if killing myself is the best thing that I can do for everybody else"—but I don't think that Scott really wants to die. I think what Scott really wants comes down to a few things: 1. he wants for the people he loves to be okay and for people to stop getting murdered; 2. he wants to have a say in his own life and to be able to make his own choices without having to worry about people dying and whether or not his choices will get people killed; and 3. he wants to not be in a nigh-on constant state of emotional distress, and he wants for the pain he's in to end, all very understandably, really.

(I feel like "Raving" is another important point in this discussion, specifically for why I think Scott doesn't consciously want to die, despite his suicidal ideation and despite the fact that I think he was conscious of what he was doing in Motel California: because Scott's been shot at and strung up in a tripwire and electrocuted (by Allison's taser) and all kinds of other things… but "Raving" had a very clear near-death experience for him, thanks to Victoria and her Wolfsbane vaporizer. Like, he passed out, he was unconscious when Derek dragged him out of there, and if not for Derek and Deaton, Scott would have died—so it's not just an issue of him being able to logically see that his death wouldn't help anyone or emotionally understand that; it's also that Scott has physically experienced coming close to death and for all he might feel like he wants to die, I don't think the experience of dying itself is really something he wants to repeat. so, he's dealing with suicidal ideation definitely, but at the same time, he doesn't consciously want to repeat that experience at all.)

and because of the way that Scott blames himself for things, and because of how it doesn't look like the pain he's in is going to end anytime soon since things are bad and just keep right on getting worse… Scott doesn't consciously want to die, but given all the stress he's under, it's understandable that he might think of death as a possible escape from all the bullshit (never mind the additional level of feeling like his death would be better for everyone else in the long run). and the fact that he doesn't consciously want to die but has to put up with suicidal thoughts… doesn't really make anything any better for Scott. on the contrary, it really just makes things worse, because it plays on Scott's control issues: Scott himself doesn't want to die, but he keeps feeling like he wants to die, and he can't control his own thoughts or feelings enough to stop himself from feeling like killing himself would be the best answer to everything he's going through, and if he can't control his own thoughts or keep himself from thinking things that he doesn't consciously agree with, then what hope does he really have for being able to exercise any agency in any other areas of his life…

So, like, the major function of self-harming for Scott, in this context, is two-fold. On the one hand, it's an exercise in regaining control and agency for him, because for once, he gets to decide when he's in pain. He gets to decide what kind of pain he's in and how much pain he's in and the manner in which the pain is inflicted and considering the implication "Fury" and "Frayed" gave us about Scott and healing (the implication that he has some manner of control over his body's healing processes, both consciously and not so consciously), Scott also gets to decide how long he's in pain. Also, there isn't a very good chance that anyone will take this away from him, again because of his body's healing processes: he's a werewolf and his body will heal itself—like, he won't even have to deal with lingering scars or burn marks, the way that a human who self-harms would, so the chance of someone accidentally seeing a scar and figuring out what it's from completely disappears—and since there's less physical evidence of what Scott's doing (like, he'd have to keep his tools of choice hidden, but there's no evidence on his body at least), there's less of a chance that he'll ever have to give it up.

(which unfortunately means that there's an increased chance of self-harming being a harder habit to break, if or when someone does find out what Scott's doing. because the thing is, self-harming is an incredibly addictive habit, for both physical and psychological reasons—physically, there is a rush of endorphins released in the wake of a self-harming action, because that's one of the body's responses to being in pain… it releases endorphins to make the pain and the healing process more bearable. and psychologically, it gives people comfort for a wide variety of reasons, and makes the psychological and emotional pain that they're dealing with easier to for them to handle in some way. basically, in Scott's case, self-harming would fill the void of less dangerous coping mechanisms in his life and he would probably think of it as a form of self-care—and on top of that, I can definitely see him rationalizing everything with some kind of explanation like, "well, there aren't really any lasting physical effects since my body heals itself, so it's okay and I can get a handle on this by myself and figure things out before anyone else does, no one needs to worry about me because I can fix this on my own, I just need some time, and self-harming is helping with that.")

on the other hand, though, one of the other things that physical pain does is that it acts as a refocusing agent, in a way. like for example, one of the early episodes of House MD—one of the first ones that dealt explicitly with House's Vicodin addiction—involves House dealing with both detoxing/the physical symptoms of withdrawal, and with the psychological symptoms of withdrawal, like craving, irritability, etc., plus the physical pain caused by his leg injury. So, in order to refocus himself, House purposefully beat the shit out of his hand with a paperweight in an attempt to use that physical pain to drown out everything else and refocus his attention where he wanted it to be by removing the extraneous background noise and replacing it with new pain—and while Scott's case and House's case really don't have a lot in common at all, I can see controlled physical pain working in a sort of similar way for Scott.

Like, by finding a self-harm mechanism that "works" for him (as much as self-harm can be described as working for anyone)—and personally, I think Scott would lean toward either cutting (because it's not hard to find a razor), using his own claws and scratching or pinching himself (because then there's no evidence period), or possibly burning himself with cigarettes (partly because I headcanon that Scott's father was a smoker and didn't stop smoking after Scott's asthma diagnosis, so there'd be extra emotional significance to cigarettes for Scott, and partly because while the primary function of the cigarettes would be burning, I can also see Scott wondering if being exposed to the smoke would trigger an asthma attack, even though his lycanthropy has mostly made his asthma a non-issue)—but however Scott ends up hurting himself, the endgame here comes down to feeling the controlled physical pain instead of feeling everything else that he's feeling. the physical pain drowns out the conflicted emotions, the emotional distress, and the suicidal ideation, and it paradoxically becomes a source of relief in and of itself for reasons other than the initial release of endorphins.

In a similar sort of vein, I could definitely see Scott developing an eating disorder—or if not a fully-fledged eating disorder then definitely disordered eating habits—that's related to his issues with control and his issues with being under constant emotional distress, not knowing how to handle the things that he's being forced to handle, and so on. like, I don't think he would wander into this intentionally—not that I think he'd wander into self-harming intentionally so much as he'd, like, accidentally hurt himself one time, then realize that it doesn't feel so bad, then keep covertly doing it—but like… part of what happens to the body when you don't eat is, again, a release of endorphins. So I picture it going down kind of like this: Scott's been working on all the things and saving everyone, and he just hasn't made time to eat, and he's hungry, he knows that he is… but it's still nicer than he's felt in weeks, so he keeps doing this whole not eating thing.

And, like, he couldn't just outright stop eating—because outright cessation of food intake is actually next to impossible in the first place, and besides, that would make it really difficult for him to save everyone—but he could still restrict his food intake enough to get both the endorphin rush and the feeling of having control and agency in some aspect of his life. and the really upsetting part about this scenario is that it's highly unlikely that Scott doing this would just go entirely unnoticed—like, Melissa's a nurse for fuck's sake, even if she's not around as often as she could be were she not working, she would notice Scott not really eating; likewise, Stiles misses some things but I don't think he'd miss this, and Isaac living with the McCalls means that he'd be able to joss any, "oh I ate a huge breakfast, I'm really not hungry enough for lunch" excuses Scott might come up with, and Lydia and Allison are both pretty observant, and Deaton would definitely notice Scott seeming kind of out of it on the job, which Scott probably would be if he wasn't eating enough—

but because of dominant societal ideas and cultural narratives about self-harm and eating disorders (namely, the ones that go, "oh only women self-harm and only women have eating disorders")… people noticing doesn't really mean a lot, in a practical sense, unless they make the correct conclusions, which isn't guaranteed to happen. Which isn't an indictment of any of the other characters at all, because… self-harm and eating disorders can be really hard to notice in the first place when you're standing on the outside and watching someone you love hurt themself, never mind actually dealing with them once you've noticed, plus everything else that's going on in Beacon Hills on a distressingly regular basis, plus having to shake off dominant cultural ideas about self-harm and eating disorders in order to get to the conclusion that Scott might be dealing with these issues in the first place, plus all the possible reasons why these characters might deny the idea that Scott needs help (the biggest, likeliest one that I can see being that they just don't know how to handle the idea that Scott needs help, especially for self-harm, an eating disorder, and/or suicidal ideation, which is fair enough because this shit is complicated and terrifying).

So I'm not trying to villainize the other characters here, or say that they're terrible people who wouldn't help Scott out—this is empirically untrue; Scott has a lot of people who love and care about him and would definitely help him out. I'm just saying that, in a hypothetical situation in which Scott were to hurt himself in any of these ways, there are a lot of hypothetical factors that might lead to people not noticing, or not noticing in the right way, the way in which Scott needs to be noticed in order to get help.

And then, even when they noticed everything, it isn't necessarily a guarantee that they would know what to do about anything or help in the way that Scott needs to be helped—like, for example, my personal headcanon about the aftermath of Scott's suicide attempt is that while Stiles kind of blurted it out at Cora, he, Lydia, and Allison haven't told anyone else about it, partly because it's not their secret to tell and even Stiles with all his boundary-crossing habits would understand that, but mostly because, like… Allison's scared and Lydia's dubious, but Stiles insists that he can help Scott out enough without getting an adult involved and possibly getting Scott labeled all kinds of ableist nonsense (like "headcase," for example) or possibly having the whole school find out that Scott tried to kill himself.

So, uh. By way of wrapping all of this up, I guess, because I actually have no idea how to conclude things when I meta/headcanon/generally feelings vomit: hi, I'm Kassie, and this has been your daily episode of, "how can I make people cry about Scott McCall?" and I'll just go sit in the corner and think about what I've done now, let me know when I'm done being in time-out. …also, if you made it this far, you should seriously go have a cookie or something, because this post is seriously ridiculously long and I still have no idea what the shit happened here, because the post I had in mind when I started writing this was honestly a lot shorter than this.


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